Fear, Laughter and Collective Power: The Making of Solidarity at the Lenin
Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, August 1980
Colin Barker*
Every record of August 1980 at Gdansk, where the Solidarity movement was founded, is packed with
incidents of human emotionality. Fear, courage, anger, laughter, nervous breakdowns, pride, and
solidarity appear at peak intensity during those astonishing seventeen days. The narrative is punctuated
by displays of feeling including tears, cheering, booing, whistling, open-air Masses, public readings of
workers' poetry, presentations of flowers. From the organized flood of feeling which focused on the
Lenin shipyard between Thursday 14th and Sunday 31st August was born the fastest-growing tradeunion movement in world history. Within three months of its recognition, Solidarity recruited ten
million members and inspired parallel movements among students, peasants, shoppers in queues,
prisoners in gaols and even philatelists.1
A View of Emotion
My thinking about emotion is influenced by that most social and historical of psychologies, the
dialogical school whose foundations were laid during the 1920s by such figures as Bakhtin, Volosinov
and Vygotsky. These writers developed a highly dialectical approach to human thought, speech and
action, and the relation between these and social structure, whose possibilities are only beginning to be
explored in social movement studies.2 From their ideas we can deduce a number of propositions.
First, there are no such "things" as emotions. In grammatical terms, we should talk about them, not
as nouns but as adjectives or adverbs, denoting qualities of action, speech and thought. As Crossley
expresses the matter, "We can perform the same behaviours lovingly, angrily, etc., and it is the way
that we do it which constitutes the emotional aspect of the behaviour" (Crossley 1998: 23). For the
dialogicians, every act has its own "emotional-volitional tone" (Bakhtin 1993: 32-7); every utterance,
however mundane, possesses what Volosinov (1986) terms an "evaluative accent." This is variously
emotional, moral, aesthetic.
Second, the cognitive and the affectual are not distinct, and especially not opposed, spheres, but are
rather inseparable aspects of each other. There are no emotions without ideas (contrary to some
symbolic interactionists, e.g. Blumer 1969), and no ideas without emotions. Treating them as distinct
and opposed opens the way both to what Sarbin (1986: 86) terms a "faculty psychology," where various
aspects of human experience and action are dissociated from each other, and to the deeply rooted
prejudice that Emotion is distinct from and antagonistic to Reason, and is indeed linked strongly to
"irrationality." Rather than treat the different aspects of human activity - for example, cognition,
emotion, memory, thought, volition, etc - as distinct (often mutually exclusive) entities, we should
explore the “dynamic unity of functions” in which different aspects of human action and mind are seen
to affect each other, in "inter-functional wholes" (Vygotsky 1986).
*
My thanks for valuable comment and criticism on earlier drafts to the editors and to Ewa Barker, Martin Barker, Paul
Brook, Chik Collins, Gareth Dale, Helena Flam, Sam Friedman and Marc Steinberg.
1 The student of Solidarity is fortunate in the quantity and quality of available materials in English. Among the more
notable, see Ash 1984, Barker 1986, Bernhard 1993, Goodwyn 1991, Kemp-Welch 1983, Laba 1991, Ost 1990, Persky
1982, Persky and Flam 1982, Potel 1982. Valuable materials appeared in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 1980-1982,
and in the workers' memoirs translated in Adamski 1982. I was privileged to read the wonderful interview material in a a
draft of Jack Bloom's forthcoming book, and a full transcript of Ewa Barker's interview with Anna Walentynowicz.
2 See for example, Bakhtin 1984, 1993, Volosinov 1976, 1986, Vygotsky 1986. Valuable commentary includes M.
Barker 1989, Bender 1998, Collins 1996, 1999, Gardiner 1992, Hall 1995, Shotter and Billig 1998, Steinberg 1996
1
Third, all action, speech and thought possesses these emotional-volitional tones, or colours, and
these indeed convey much of their particular sense. We take words embodying socially shared
meanings from the mouths of others, but we return them bearing our own intentions and nuances,
giving them individual accents and senses. Emotional tone and gesture are important means by which
we achieve this. Communicative interaction and practical action are always creative processes, much
of that creativity consisting in the emotional, moral and aesthetic tone with which we invest what we
say and do.
Fourth, we need to grasp ideas, speech and actions, with their accents, tones, colours and gestural
qualities, in the inter-subjective contexts in which they occur. That is, we need to grasp them as part of
dialogical processes occurring in concrete historical settings.
Fifth, one element of variation in emotional-volitional tones is their intensity, or their "organismic
involvement" (Sarbin 1986: 93). This is an aspect of the degree of the investment (Barker and Brooks
1998) - that is, their degree of attention, care and concern - people make in a given topic, activity, or
relationship.
Sixth, emotional tones and colours switch and change in interactional settings, producing
"qualitative breaks" and reconfigurations, "transmutations" of thought (Vygotsky 1986). A shift in
context can produce rapid, and more or less dramatic refocusings of feelings and ideas. How we orient
to something is itself affected by our orientation to other objects and topics, as it also affected by the
orientations of other people around us. Our emotional tones are crucial and changing aspects of our
many-sided activities and understandings.
In this light, this paper explores some of the emotional dynamics at work in Gdansk.
The Strike Movement Begins
Over two weeks in August, some three million Polish workers organized occupation strikes in perhaps
1500 workplaces, coordinating their activities through regional Inter-Factory Strike Committees (in
Polish MKS). The strikers empowered their MKS leaderships to negotiate publicly with the
government, who finally conceded all 21 Points of the workers' demands. First among these was the
call for new, independent unions.
A tiny network of opposition activists provided the initiative. In Gdansk, a small group openly
announced themselves as a Founding Committee of Free Trade Unions of the Coast (Bernhard 1993)
and began running their own illegal news sheet, the Coastal Worker. To succeed, they needed to break
out of the world of propaganda and to involve large numbers of workers in organized collective action.
Their opportunities improved when, on 1st July 1980, the regime raised food prices. Strikes erupted
across Poland and the government responded with pay concessions. Although Gdansk was relatively
untouched by this strike wave, popular confidence was generally enhanced. Then, in early August, one
local Gdansk activist, Anna Walentynowicz, was sacked from the Lenin shipyard. The local
oppositionists decided to risk calling a protest strike. At the time, they only gave themselves a "50 per
cent chance" of rallying their fellow-workers (Borowczak 1982: 72). Walentynowicz herself thought
they would fail, thinking local workers were "not yet ready" (Kemp-Welch 1983: 17).
On Thursday morning, 14th August, a handful of shipyard activists went into their Departments to
argue for immediate strike action in defence of Walentynowicz. Jerzy Borowczak described the
emotional-intellectual dynamics in his section: workers were initially hesitant, until he told them other
Departments were already striking.
Finally the urge to get out won the day. I gathered a group of about 30 people. We took our
banner, the posters and leaflets, and began marching across the whole shipyard to Ludwig's
department. On our way, we stopped a tow-motor, and it went ahead to the other departments to
tell them that we were already marching towards them, which helped to mobilize people. You
2
know, one department is already on strike... so that makes everybody more courageous."
(Borowczak 1982: 75)
In department W-3, Bogdan Felski and two co-workers also started arguing for a strike. As he
talked, Felski sensed a growth in self-confidence among his listeners, and gathered some 50 round a
banner. After a confrontation with the Department Party Secretary, they also marched out (Solidarity
Strike Bulletin 11, 30 August 1980: 30).
As they marched, Borowczak's group picked up other workers. Decisive action by a minority
started a snowball, increasing the numbers committed to the strike, and adding to the voices calling
others to join. The risk was paying off. The procession continued through the shipyard, gathering
numbers. Eventually some 8,000 demonstrators (about half the workforce) halted at the shipyard's
Second Gate, to hold a minute's silence in honour of workers killed there in a previous movement in
1970.
As yet, the strikers composed a still disorganized collective crowd with a common sentiment but no
clear organization and shared purpose. Outside the management offices, Borowczak called for
nominations to a strike committee - "people we can trust." Some 20 names were suggested, mostly the
young activists who had started the strike in their departments. The shipyard director's attempt to get
the crowd to call the strike off was met with derisive whistles. Lech Walesa, who had climbed over the
shipyard wall, now appeared at the director's shoulder. Identifying himself as someone they all knew,
an electrician previously sacked from the shipyard for militant activity, he confidently announced an
occupation strike. He was immediately adopted as strike committee chairman. Walentynowicz, at the
strikers' insistence, was fetched from home in the director's car. Her arrival was greeted by a cheering,
singing crowd of thousands, as she took off her glasses to wipe away her tears.
The shipyard stoppage was itself a signal to other Gdansk workplaces, where activists also
organized occupation-strikes. In one morning, a small activist group had stopped a huge workplace,
employing 16,000, and then spread the strike to more than a dozen others. They had mobilized their
immediate periphery - a minority of bolder, mostly younger workers - and this larger group had pulled
the more timid behind them, isolating regime loyalists. The activists had successfully read the Gdansk
workers' general mood and internal relations.
Ideologeme and Structure of Feeling
Survey evidence before August 1980 suggests that Polish workers were widely mistrustful of a regime
they believed founded in lies and capable of bloody violence against them (Mason 1985, Nowak 1980,
1981, Vale 1981). A widespread “unofficial consciousness” manifested itself in political jokes about
official corruption, privilege, inefficiency and injustice, a sense of moral disgust and emotional
withdrawal from identification with the regime. Any sense of authenticity in social life was restricted
to the privatized world of relations within families and among friends, where relations of honest
speech, trust and relative equality were seen to reign. Many declared their support for illegal methods
as a means of resolving conflicts, including strikes, absenteeism, slowdowns, even industrial sabotage
(Bernhard 1993: 152).
Until August 1980, however, Polish workers had difficulty converting their feelings (their “inner
speech”) about social and public life into forms of outward speech, in which they might gain clarity and
vigour through dialogical development (Volosinov 1976a: 89). Popular critical thought had the
character of an ideologeme, a feeling which, while the product of social experience, still lacks
"embodiment in the context of a discipline constituting some unified ideological system" (Volosinov
1986: 33). To be developed and elaborated, an ideologeme requires “choral support” from others
(Volosinov 1986: 33, 152-3; 1976b: 103).
The literary critic, Raymond Williams (1977, 1979), offers the related notion of a structure of
feeling. The term indexes a tension between official ideas and practical experience, which has not yet
3
found adequate expression, and which may remain latent for a long period. While Williams focuses on
how certain new artistic works can act to reveal submerged forms of feeling in a "sudden shock of
recognition" (Williams 1979: 164), his insight can be generalized beyond the reception of specifically
literary works.
At Gdansk a new work did produce a shock of recognition - only this was not a book or film but
the emerging strike movement itself. The opposition activists had found a way by which workers'
feelings about the regime and themselves could be practically articulated. This work was authored by
those who read it, made more powerful by its very form, and its shock itself involved self-recognition.
From August 14th, growing numbers of workers began to discover and develop a new environment
of practical and communicative possibilities among themselves. This involved a high degree of
emotional investment of care and energy, as one aspect of a whole cognitive and practical reorientation
of social relations. It involved collective empowerment, the development of new social and personal
identities, and a self-recognition of themselves as history-makers.
Crisis and Development
In its first phase the movement did not directly pose the question of free trade unions. The shipyard
strikers demanded a substantial pay rise, reinstatement for Walentynowicz and Walesa, and the right to
construct a monument to their slaughtered colleagues of 1970. In other workplaces that joined the
strike, too, demands were predominantly local and "economic." The advance to larger demands
occurred through a major crisis in the movement's development.
That crisis was induced by a management ploy. The newly elected strike committee, in the name
of democracy, compelled the management to negotiate in front of open microphones, so that the whole
shipyard could listen to the talks. But the shipyard director also used the term democracy to propose
that a more representative strike committee be elected. The activists could hardly refuse, but the larger
body turned out - as the director had calculated - to include numbers of Party supporters, foremen and
others. By Saturday afternoon, the initial demands had been conceded. The director now urged, with
the support of his allies on the enlarged strike committee, that the strike finish. The activists, arguing
to continue the occupation until other striking workplaces had also won, were out-voted. Walesa, as
chairman, was trapped into agreeing. At three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, his voice echoed across
the shipyard, announcing the occupation was over.
Workers began to stream home. There was confusion, angry shouting, uncertainty. If the shipyard
returned to work, then the smaller strategic workplaces would be isolated. You can't fight tanks with
trams, Krystyna Krzywonos, a tram workers' strike leader, told Walesa: We'll be crushed like flies.
Some activists from other workplaces marched off angrily. Facing a still fair-sized crowd, Walesa
gambled. Who wants to continue the strike? he asked, winning back a roar of assent. The strike
continues, he announced.
Walentynowicz and Alina Pienkowska (a nurse from the shipyard hospital) ran to use the
microphones in the conference hall. They had been shut off. Outside, they could hear the shipyard
director's voice booming from loudspeakers: The strike is over; everyone must leave the shipyard by six
o'clock, or the agreement will be canceled. The two women rushed to Gate 3, where they met a crowd
leaving. Walentynowicz tried to speak to them, to be faced with an angry worker challenging her right
to declare the strike. I've got a family, I've got children, he yelled, I'm going home. She burst into
tears. Pienkowska, who had never spoken publicly before, took charge, ordering the strikers' militia to
lock the gates while a few minutes' meeting was held. The strike is still on, she told them: Walesa was
out-voted, but most workers want to continue, because there are no guarantees, and no free trade
unions. If you leave, the activists will be sacked again. The most important thing is the solidarity of all
the factories. When the gates were re-opened, some of the crowd stayed.
4
Quite likely less than a thousand of the 16,000 workforce remained. Certainly the big majority had
gone. However, two days of strike activity had considerably expanded the numbers of the activist
minority, for only the most committed stayed. Nonetheless, the strike was now in crisis. Bogdan Lis
and Andrzej Gwiazda, feeling betrayed by the ending of the Lenin shipyard strike, had gone back to the
Elmor factory, where they delivered bitter speeches, and won agreement to continue that strike. They
toured other factories by car, bringing their delegates back to Elmor, to form a new battle-centre.
Gradually the situation clarified. Some workers learned at home that the shipyard strike was on again,
and returned. The delegates gathered at Elmor decamped back to the shipyard.
That Saturday evening, in the shipyard hall, the somewhat battered activists assessed the situation.
No compromisers now muddied their debates. For good or ill, they had full charge. 21 enterprises
were represented, and the strike was holding at all of them. However, the crucial Lenin shipyard
workforce was divided between an occupying minority and the rest who had dispersed - and whose
feelings could only be guessed. Could they win the shipyard again, especially now that workforce had
enjoyed a taste of practical solidarity? The tension was considerable. From moment to moment the
activists did not know if the security forces might attack.
Whatever their fears, they had committed themselves. That night, they formed a new organization:
the Inter-Factory Strike Committee (MKS). They elected a Praesidium, renewed the workers' militia
with warnings to be extra-vigilant, and proceeded to draw up demands. The MKS had a precedent, for
such bodies had emerged in both Szczecin and Gdansk in the insurgency of 1970-71 (Laba 1991), but
now they went beyond anything previously declared. Their demands, eventually twenty-one in
number, were now general, addressing the conditions facing the Polish working class at large. At their
head was a call for new, free trade unions, smartly followed by the guaranteed right to strike, the
release of political prisoners, controls over censorship, and a series of specific economic demands
about wages, pensions, health services and social equality. They were launching the strike movement
onto a quite new path, challenging the very basis of the regime.
Now their mobilization problem had also shifted. To succeed, they must simultaneously win back
the shipyard workforce - or the heart of the scheme would collapse - and spread the strike far beyond
the enterprises around the shipyards. They proceeded energetically and imaginatively. They sent out
messengers with news of the MKS and its new demands to every workplace in the region they could
reach. And, during Saturday evening's crucial meeting, they resolved to hold a public Mass at the
shipyard gates.
A local priest was found to perform the ceremony. He was so nervous that, before he set out, he
made his will (Bloom, ch.8: 21). At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, before gates bedecked with
flowers, ribbons and flags, the priest began a Field Mass, beside a wooden cross at the spot where
workers had been killed ten years before. The Mass, to be sure, had religious significance for many.
But it also performed a huge mobilizing function. Thousands attended.
But still everything hung on Monday morning. The main body of the shipyard workforce gathered
outside. On the gate stood Lech Walesa with a bull-horn. Come in, he urged cheerfully, join us, it will
be safe. The large crowd hesitated, still uncertain. Then a group of young workers, cheering, marched
in to rejoin the strike, pulling the rest of the crowd in behind them. The strike was secured again.
Now the MKS took control again of the loudspeaker system. The main hall became a permanent
meeting place, all its sessions and discussions broadcast across the shipyard, and outside to the square
beyond. Again, with redoubled energy, the whole shipyard area was placed under the control of the
strike committee. The bond between the activists and the workforce was rebuilt.
Now the movement turned its attentions and its energies outward, towards the rest of the Polish
working class and towards the regime. During the first Monday, delegations from additional striking
workplaces began arriving at the shipyard gates, to join the MKS. Their credentials were checked by
the workers' militia, and they were admitted to the shipyard hall. As they arrived, each was announced
and each explained where they were from, what was happening in their workplace, and why they were
5
joining (for examples, see Potel 1982: 57-65). Every arrival, every addition, enhanced the sense of
collective power. By nightfall, 156 workplaces from the Gdansk region had formally affiliated to the
Inter-Factory Strike Committee and added its delegates to the roll of those entitled to vote - an
astonishing feat of mobilization.
The events of that weekend are filled with highly charged emotional activity: people shout at each
other, rush about desperately, burst into tears, stomp off in fury, plead for solidarity, achieve
reconciliation. Observing their behaviour from a distance, we might feel inclined to describe them in
the terminology of "collective behaviour" theory (e.g. Blumer 1969): people seem to "mill about" under
the influence of "social unrest" and "collective excitement," to be neurotically "prowling without the
regulation of group norms." But such a description focuses only on the emotional quality of action, and
disregards its intellectual and purposive content.
The activist leadership had been taken by surprise, and disoriented, by management's tactics.
During Saturday afternoon's confusuion, they faced a new and unexpected set of problems which threw
them into massive uncertainty. Some felt Walesa had conceded to their opponents, inducing feelings of
hot mistrust, a breakdown of communications as they retreated bitterly to their own workplaces to
regroup. Within the shipyard, activists argued with workers to stay, often with frustrating results.
Certainly, there was a high level of emotionality, but it was an emotionality of people struggling to
make sense of a sharply reconfigured situation, and searching creatively for solutions and
understandings. It was full of cognitive content.
The Saturday afternoon crisis represented a fork in the development of the strike movement.
Finding adequate solutions required a furious dialogical exchange, over a period of a few hours. In the
process, some actors drew on their personal resources to achieve new things (Pienkowska, for example,
spoke publicly for the first time in her life). Had the activists not developed close relations of trust
among themselves in the period before the strike, Saturday afternoon's sharp antagonisms might have
prevented the continuation of talk among them, making the new Saturday evening resolution of their
difficulties impossible. As matters turned out, the crisis proved to be a moment of considerable
creativity, during which people formed provisional conclusions, revised them, renegotiated the social
relations among themselves, re-cast their goals and their tactics, developing new organizational
structures and new collective leadership. The very emotional tensions and antagonisms were signals of
a whole complex which required restructuring, of a process of mutual exploration and very energetic
talk.
Feelings and Practicality
Workplace occupations were already a recognized element in Polish workers' repertoire of contention
(Laba 1991, Goodwyn 1991), and people knew what to do. The strike committee appointed a workers'
militia, and banned alcohol from the workplace. They prepared gas canisters for use if tanks burst in.
They organized blankets, mattresses and food. Using local materials, occupiers constructed a tent city
across the shipyard, unleashing playful imagination (there were workers' dachas built like "a small villa
with a porch and a quasi-colonnade" (Kuczma 1982: 261)). The strikers were imposing their own
collective order, developing a new self-organized division of labour, thus enhancing confidence.
When, after the first Monday, the whole movement fell under the coordinated direction of the
MKS, practical control of features of everyday life across the Gdansk region was further wrested from
the regime. Striking public transport workers returned to work on MKS instructions, now sporting
strike posters and Polish flags. Trucks and taxis moved with written permits from the MKS. Food
distribution was falling under the workers' control. Links with local farmers brought food supplies to
the shipyard. On MKS instructions, a canning factory returned to work, so as not to waste the fish
brought in by Baltic fishermen returning to port. Local artists came in to some workplaces to perform
music, plays, poetry readings.
6
Each small practical extension of their own control over the environment had a significant
emotional and intellectual aspect. Collective control was itself an embodied demonstration of the
movement's effectiveness, affecting confidence in the movement and its leadership, drawing further
layers into active involvement in the collective work, into taking personal responsibility and leadership
roles.3
Workplaces became relatively secure appropriated spaces, their boundaries carefully guarded, with
state and employer access denied except on the workers' terms. The occupations provided strikers with
room and time to order their thoughts and their demands. Organized democracy is a useful means, it
seems, to fight for organized democracy. Though there were apparently no calls for workers'
ownership during the August strikes, the strikers did assert a kind of usufruct, turning workplaces into
sites where their writ alone would run. Here the centre of a partial new social order began to be
created, symbolically represented through practical action.
Division and development
The whole development occurred under conditions of high tension, with telephone links between
Gdansk and the rest of Poland cut, hostile media declaring that "anti-socialist" forces were intimidating
people, rumours of troop movements, helicopters buzzing over workplaces and dropping leaflets, and
hard-liners in the ruling Party urging the use of force. Memories of the deaths in 1970 were never far
away.
The MKS was undertaking an immense organizational struggle (Goodwyn 1991). Couriers went
out to every part of Poland, armed with messages from the MKS. Many were stopped, arrested and
beaten in police cells. Yet each day new delegates affilated to the MKS. Over two weeks, the Gdansk
Committee expanded its coverage to over 600 workplaces. Down the coast, at Szczecin, a parallel
MKS grew to 740. There was a further MKS at Elblag, and then later at Wroclaw in Upper Silesia, in
southwestern Poland.
During the MKS's first week, a government delegation attempted to divide and rule Gdansk,
offering separate agreements to individual workplaces. Seventeen factories joined these talks, refusing
contact with the MKS for a couple of worrying days. Eventually, the government initiative collapsed,
and the seventeen rejoined the MKS, the delegates hailing their return with relieved applause and
singing.
Regime loyalists spied for the police or tried to sow division and in numbers of cases were
formally expelled from the occupations (Gajda 1982:243; Kuczma 1982:264-5; Kaszuba 1982: 285;
Bloom, ch.8:47-8). In the middle of a Gdansk MKS delegates' meeting on the first Thursday, a Lenin
shipyard personnel officer read a ten-minute statement over the microphone. In tones "clogged with
pathos," he appealed to the Party leader to come to the shipyard as he had in 1971: "you, Edward
Gierek, who alone we trust, because you are to us like a father." This statement was received with
resounding applause, until Anna Walentynowicz identified the speaker: "I know Mr Lesniak... he has
persecuted me for years - it was he who sacked me two weeks ago." The meeting erupted in fury, and
the man had to be escorted from the shipyard for his own safety (Ash 1983: 53-4). The sudden
emotional switch from applause to excoriation among many of the delegates is revealing: they were
still learning how far the movement was traveling compared with 1970-71. Then, Gierek could end a
strike movement by appealing to workers for "help," and strike committees had still, in a sense, pleaded
with the government. Now, that language was outmoded, indeed had become part of the way "they"
talked. A new articulation of the structure of feeling was still being refined. Events like this provided
3 The effects of poor organization were tangible: at the Predom Metrix factory, a strike committee member recalls, "I
must admit that part of our people were not quite in high spirits. Probably because we had not solved well the problems of
sleeping accommodations and food as a sit-down strike required" (Szylak 1982:298).
7
moments of danger but also possibilities of clarification, persuasively tying the delegates closer to the
core activists' understandings and aims.
Although the strike movement grew, and consolidated, fear still competed with confident
solidarity. Joanna Duda-Gwiazda, a member of the MKS Praesidium, was hospitalized for the
remainder of the strike with a nervous breakdown (Kemp-Welch 1983: 51, 184); there were other
reports of workers collapsing under nervous strain (Gajda 1982: 245). At the Paris Commune shipyard,
scene of the worst slaughter of 1970, several workers had epileptic attacks (Pawelec 1982: 274). In
Gdynia, for some time, workers were afraid to let their names go forward as members of the strike
committee (Bloom, ch.8: 25).
At Szczecin, Aleksander Krystosiak reported:
The vice-chair of my strike committee resigned on the fourth or fifth day of the strike. His wife,
a young woman with children, came to the fence to talk to him. She started crying about what
could happen, that he could get killed, that he would be jailed, that they would send him to hunt
Polar bears in Siberia -- and he quit. So I lost one of my best people. In other factories,
sometimes as much as half the strike committee had to be re-elected because the people would
give up out of fear. (Bloom, ch.8: 46)
But not everyone manifested fear. Strikers' memoirs recall time spent fishing in a workplace canal,
playing practical jokes, running card schools, reading and writing poetry and songs, organizing sports,
and building up souvenir collections of strike memorabilia (Gajda 1982; Kuczma 1982; Pawelec 1982).
The meaning of the activity and social relations Gdansk workers were shaping was itself
undergoing constant evaluation and development. The occupations provided a space for testing social
relations, sometimes through sharp internal conflicts. There was an outbreak of talk. As Trotsky
noted, revolutions are “very wordy affairs” (Trotsky 1965, c.f. also Laba 1991:129) Workers turned to
writing poetry, the more popular productions read out on the shipyard microphone. With additional
workplaces affiliating to the MKS and sending their delegates to the shipyard, there was a continual
process of mutual self-education, a new making of shared identities. It took argument and experiment
to develop certainty of direction within the MKS and the wider movement they were working to lead.
There were many shaky moments. Collective self-confidence had to be constructed, tested against
adversities, through ongoing dialogue between the activists and their growing periphery. Each time
they overcame an obstacle, confidence and collective clarity were enhanced. But unity was always
provisional, open to new affective impulses from within and without, and thus had always to be
secured.
Rituals and Symbols
Throughout the Gdansk events workers employed ritual and symbolic forms of action. The initial
shipyard march held a one-minute silence in memory of the workers killed in 1970. Singing of national
and other songs was a regular feature of MKS proceedings. Ritualized forms of collective expression
such as clapping, cheering, booing and whistling signaled workers' approval and disapproval of
speakers and actors. Catholic Masses were held at workplaces. New adherents to the MKS were
formally announced, like new arrivals at some aristocratic ball. Proceedings at MKS meetings were
often conducted with great formality, as indeed were the talks with the government delegation. The
final, televised ceremony, where Walesa for the MKS and Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski exchanged
signed copies of the agreement, conveyed the air of a peace treaty between sovereign powers - as,
indeed, it partly was.
The Lenin shipyard gates became a place of secular pilgrimage, acquiring symbolic significance as
a place where huge transformations might be accomplished. Thousands would gather outside, to
watch, to talk, to listen, to grab strike bulletins, to ponder on the messages and posters, to bring flowers,
8
to learn.4 People holidaying on the coast brought their children to see history being made, and to carry
the strike message back to their own regions. On the wall by the gates were the MKS's 21 demands.
Across the gates, above the Pope's portrait and flowers and ribbons, was a banner: “Workers of all
factories, unite!” The gates were a place to laugh, to be solemn and anxious, to weep, to hope.
Rituals and symbols are collective means of emotional communication, ways of formalizing shared
feelings. Existing as repertoires of already learned forms of action, they are adaptable to various
circumstances. They are pregnant with complex meanings.
Rituals, Strathern and Stewart (1998: 237-9) suggest, can be considered from two complementary
standpoints, that of embodiment, or their effects on participants, and actors' communicative purposes.
Ritual acts "form a body language, producing a ritualized agent, always acting however within a
historic context.... By means of the body... performers personify who they are, and what they intend to
become in relation to the forces about them." Rituals possess sensuous, aesthetic qualities, drawing
people into collective performances where bodies are meaningfully active together. But these emotionladen qualities do not exist apart from content, meanings, reasons, perceptions, memories, aspirations.
Participants in rituals communicate whole complexes of ideas and embodied feelings. Ritualized
action is a form of emotional self-presentation which is itself a "sign" (for example, of calm selfconfidence, of solidarity, of enthusiasm, of discipline) to onlookers and opponents and to self. Rituals
and shared symbols are choral, multi-vocal forms of communication. They are shorthand means of
communication, capable of unifying actors whose particular ideas are not all the same, focusing
attention on elements of shared experience. Being public, they have a binding quality, embodying a
promise to align with others. Rituals affirm, by communicating affirmation. They enhance solidarity,
binding participants more closely to the shared purpose.
While all the ritualized actions at Gdansk shared the common idea of workers' solidarity, various
forms each articulated different aspects. The one minute's silence at the shipyard gate, in honour of the
dead of 1970, betokened a narrative connection between the immediate battle and a history of workers'
struggles in Poland; formal patterns of address at MKS sessions or at workplace Masses communicated
the high seriousness of the proceedings; carrying Walesa shoulder-high to the shipyard gates after the
final ceremony signaled the triumphant overcoming of difficulties.
There were occasions for such forms of action: they punctuated, almost in a grammatical sense, the
patterns of action. There was little ritual action during the crisis of the first Saturday afternoon; ritual
action tended to follow and in a sense to interpret and summarize "turning points" in the movement's
development once they had been achieved. Rituals were moments for breath, for shared statements
about progress to date, and for linking the present to its history and its future becoming.
The Negotiations
The whole region's attention focused on the MKS when, finally, the regime agreed to formal talks, led
by Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski. With the strikes still spreading, the government was compelled to
recognize the workers' new institutions and demands. At the workers' insistence, the talks were held in
front of microphones at the shipyard, in the presence of the full MKS. It is doubtful that union
negotiations have ever been so public. There were five meetings in total, climaxing on Sunday 31st
August in a televised ceremony, where, finally, the regime would publicly accept all the MKS's
demands.5
The MKS Praesidium did the actual talking with government, taking its key cues from the
delegates, whose comments, sarcastic laughter and applause could be heard throughout. The MKS
4 At the Szczecin MKS, down the coast, the main shipyard gates became a place for bridal couples to place their
bouquets at the end of local weddings (Bloom, ch.9:1). Elsewhere, strike gates also projected such messages as
“humankind is born and lives free” (Laba, 1991: 135).
5 A complete transcript of the talks is translated in Kemp-Welch 1983.
9
leadership both gave expression to a developed oppositional discourse of collective identity and
emphasized its meaning to the audience, who rallied behind them vocally. If the audience was a
"chorus" in the drama of the talks, it also disciplined the MKS speakers, who spoke for the people, but
under their control, and to a broad script that had been agreed earlier within the delegate body. At the
end of the talks, Walesa felt impelled to ask the delegates, "Did we do okay?"
The strikers' spokespeople hurled an enhanced sense of workers' dignity and moral value in the
face of a regime they declared incapable of honesty and competence, laying claim to a revalued status
for themselves and the Polish people at large. The regime's representatives had to put up with their
boldness.
Praesidium members spoke very plainly, contradicting official accounts of reality, and giving
public expression to popular feelings and experiences. Some important moments during the talks
consisted, simply, in their uttering aloud truths that had been hidden or euphemized. Jagielski told the
first meeting that the safety of all strikers and their helpers was guaranteed. Walesa replied, "We don't
see it quite like this. Plenty of people are sitting in prison, and plenty more are beaten up. These are
the facts." (Kemp-Welch 1983: 43) On the question of trials for political offences, Walesa declared,
We know what kind of trials they were.... for the truth is we attended these trials. I was here,
and others too. I can say straight out because I am a worker and don't mince words that they
were rigged.
The delegates' hall appluaded loudly. Florian Wisniewski, a building worker, added: "People can
be done for anything. I know such cases. I know life. I know how careful you must be." (Kemp-Welch
1983: 48)
At the first meeting, on Saturday 23rd August, the MKS set a precondition for further talks:
telephone links with other centres must be re-opened. The regime had tried to blockade Gdansk, to
stop the strikes spreading further. The MKS knew their strength lay in strikers' capacity to
communicate freely with each other, and to extend the scope of their new democratic struggle to wider
layers of the Polish working class. The government side wriggled and resisted, sometimes with blatant
lies that confirmed workers' opinion of them: Zielinksi, a Politbureau member, declared, to a chorus of
protest,
A hurricane passed through Warsaw last night, destroying buildings in large areas of the city....
The central telephone exchange was completely demolished.
Henryka Krzywonos, a tram-driver, bluntly explained why they needed the telephones, both asserting
the general nature of their movement, and their calm confidence:
We want, in fact we demand, that the whole of Poland knows what is happening here. We are
fighting on behalf of the whole population - workers, employees, peasants.... We have waited a
long time. Now we are in no hurry. (Applause)" (Kemp-Welch 1983: 55)
After two days' prevarication, the telephone lines were re-opened. MKS determination had won a
further victory, which they promptly used to spread the strikes further. In any case, events were
running the strikers' way. By Tuesday, the day of the second talks, a further MKS had been created in
Wroclaw, and strikes were underway in Lodz, Krakow, Poznan and smaller towns, many declaring
solidarity with the workers of the coast and with the 21 demands (Kemp-Welch 188).
Laughter at government statements punctuated the negotiations. There was especial mirth at
Jagielski's suggestion that secret policemen needed more pay - because their hours of work were not
fixed (Kemp-Welch 1983: 61-2). How liberating, to be able to laugh at the secret police! The
Solidarnosc strike bulletin commented in print, after the second talks:
The atmosphere of this meeting is totally different from the old ones. Many things have changed
certainly. People laugh, laugh more and more, more and more freely!
10
We could however take a poll to find out how the words of Mr. Deputy Premier, who reiterates
his sincerity and his truthfulness, were received. The answer was unanimous: "The more the
Deputy Premier insists on his sincerity, the more sincere our laughter becomes in the hall."
(Solidarity Strike Bulletin No 6, 27 August 1980: 18)
The MKS offered theorized analyses of the causes for economic and political failures, declaring
roundly that, as a condition for social renewal, they must be admitted into the polity on their own
terms. They not only declared the "worthiness" Tilly (1994) finds at the heart of social movement
claims, but their own competence. Gwiazda's claim about the Polish working class was echoed by
others:
Polish society, as seen here on the Coast, has demonstrated its rationality, calmness and maturity.
The applause we hear from the hall every time the words "free unions" are mentioned is evidence
that people have already matured.
The workers' organizations were bidding, with assurance, for a central place in a new Polish power
set-up. The MKS speakers were saying aloud things which nobody had been allowed to utter in public,
and tying their analysis of society's ills to a definite institutional proposal. The audience, whose own
self-organization made such speech possible, were themselves electrified.
At the next meeting, Gwiazda addressed the question of political prisoners. He detailed several
cases, and then generalized:
We are guaranteed personal safety for those taking strike action and their supporters and they will
not be repressed, but how can we be sure that false witnesses will not be found, and a rigged trial
held, to reveal that the entire Interfactory Strike Committee is a gang of criminals? This causes
us great anxiety [applause].... This a matter of the utmost importance. On it, depends whether
our country can be described as a democracy or a police state. We live in a land where national
unity is imposed by the police truncheon....[applause].
Jagielski expostulated, "These statements are very far-reaching.... It seems to me that you are taking
matters very far." We are, replied Gwiazda, but people now live in generalized fear:
Prime Minister, we do not expect you to know the details of every transgression and explain
them. But we do intend that a picture of life as it really is should emerge from them. Life as
experienced by an ordinary person. (Kemp-Welch 1983: 109)
During the second week, it became clear that the government's game was up. Strikes began in the
last major industrial region, the mining area of Lower Silesia. The government accepted all the 21
demands. In the final talks, the MKS mood was buoyant, for victory was clearly in their grasp. Indeed,
they were already looking forward to what they might achieve with their new unions. To Jagielski's
denial that the pay demands could be met, Walesa responded that the money was there "in the swollen
state apparatus." When we get our unions, he declared, we'll strike if the money is not taken from the
state administration: "We shall demand to know why they take this money that should be ours." And
when the now familiar liar, Zielinksi, protested that there were no privileges for Party members,
Walesa swept the issue aside with the threatening promise: "We'll investigate as unions. We'll get to
the bottom of it. Our journals will publish whatever is found. We'll clean it up! So let's not make it a
problem now. We'll investigate!" (Kemp-Welch 1983: 133)
The final signing of the agreement, including all 21 demands and the promised release within 24
hours of the detainees, took on a ceremonial air, with applause and singing before the world's TV
cameras. Walesa, carried shoulder-high to the shipyard gates, addressed a huge cheering and singing
throng.
In Conclusion
11
Episodes of collective action like that in Gdansk have strong emotional components. If we reject
simplistic associations between emotionality and irrationality, what part does emotion play in these
processes of cognitive, organizational, development?
There is, I think, no warrant for treating the emotional aspects of behaviour in isolation. They
make no sense apart from other aspects of action, speech and thought (Coulter 1986). Rather, the
"emotional-volitional tone" or "evaluative accent" of people's acts and speeches are an essential
element of the particular creative sense they make of situations. Emotions do not "hang over the entire
event in a numinous manner,"6 but are always tied to particular moments of action, dialogue,
mobilization, are always situational and relational. They define features of interaction as this alters
through the narrative.
The emotional tone of the different actors at Gdansk was not fixed, but flickered and changed
colour to express their developing senses of particular situations. People acted and expressed
themselves fearfully, for example, but they were not always afraid What they remembered about the
events, as their memoirs show, were alterations in emotions: fear then laughter, doubt and pleasure,
solidarity and contempt, solemn silences and fierce shouting, moments of panic and idylls. It is
precisely through the shifts in emotional expression that they (and we) make much of the sense of the
story of the events at Gdansk.
What was especially significant in those events was the emergence of new ideas and feelings,
embodied in new social relationships, institutions and collective power. They were produced intersubjectively, not from isolated psyches but in communicative social agency. The idea of new free
unions was both shared and enriched by passing through many voices who began to make it their own.
In August workers began learning to feel easy with new terms and social relations, making them into
commonsense by rooting the narratives of the strikes within their own autobiographies. That process
was always risky, open-ended and capable of turning out differently. If a pre-existing structure of
feeling found practical articulation, its particular shape had to be argued for persuasively, and given
practical forms validated by experience.
The leading activists never shaped the whole development alone. Certainly, they had first
articulated the general aspiration to free trade unions, but only in practical interaction with many others
could they explore the possible meanings and viability of their orienting idea, and give it concrete
shape. Mobilizing large numbers to their cause added innumerable voices to the overall decisionmaking process, and as the enlarging body of strikers discussed - sometimes very acrimoniously - in a
continually shifting field of constraints and possibilities, a huge and passionate collective dialogue
crystallized their ideas, and cemented new patterns of social organization. Thus the processes at
Gdansk were of interactive discovery.
In the tradition deriving from Le Bon, individuals engaging in collective action lose their identities
and their rationality, overcome by crowd emotions. It is surely more useful to suggest that they change
their identities and rationalities. In a dialogical account, we see people shifting the meanings of their
identities, adopting new ones, both personal and social, in processes of communicative action full of
their own emotional colours. The salience of different identities (Reicher 1996a, 1996b) shifts through
their interactions with the regime and among themselves, in a making not a loss of identities.
What we see at Gdansk is the transformation of whole configurations of ideas and feelings, in ways that
enable and constrain new possibilities of action and thought. Because of the content of their
achievement, the passionate voices of Gdansk should be heard again.
6
Marc Steinberg, personal communication.
12
References
Adamski, Wladyslaw W., ed. 1982. Sisyphus Sociological Studies, Volume 3: Crises and Conflicts, The Case of Poland 1980-1981.
Warsaw: PWN - Polish Scientific Publishers
Ash, Timothy Garton. 1983. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980-1982. London: Cape
Bakhtin, M.M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist. Austin Texas: University of Texas Press
--------. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press
--------. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translated by Vern McGee, Austin
TX: University of Texas Press
--------. 1993. Toward a Philosophy of the Act, edited by Michael Holquist and V. Liapunov, translated by V. Liapunov. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1993
Barker, Colin. 1986. Festival of the Oppressed: Solidarity, Reform and Revolution in Poland 1980-81. London: Bookmarks
Barker, Ewa. 1980. Manuscript of interview with Anna Walentynowicz, Gdansk, September 1980
Barker, Martin. 1989. Comics: ideology, power and the critics. Manchester, Manchester University Press
-------- and Kate Brooks. 1998. "On looking into Bourdieu's black box," pp. 218-232 in Approaches to Audiences: A Reader, edited by
Roger Dickinson, Ramaswami Harandranath and Olga Linne. London: Edward Arnold
Bernhard, Michael H. 1993. The Origins of Democratization in Poland: Workers, Intellectuals and Oppositional Politics, 1976-1980. New
York: Columbia University Press
Bloom, Jack. forthcoming. Looking Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. "Collective behaviour," pp. 67-123 in Principles of Sociology, edited by Alfred McClung Lee. 3rd edition. New
York: Barnes and Noble.
Borowczak, Jerzy. 1982. "At the Lenin Shipyard: Interview with Jerzy Borowczak" pp. 73-78 in The Solidarity Sourcebook edited by
Stan Persky and Henry Flam. Vancouver: New Star
Collins, Chik. 1996. “To concede or to contest? Language and class struggle”, pp. 69-90 in To Make Another World: Studies in protest
and collective action, edited by Colin Barker and Paul Kennedy. Aldershot: Avebury
--------. 1999. Language, Ideology and Social Consciousness: Developing a sociohistorical approach. Aldershot: Ashgate
Coulter, Jeff. 1986. "Affect and social context: emotion definition as a social task." pp. 120-133 in The Social Construction of Emotions,
edited by Rom Harré. Oxford: Blackwell
Crossley, Nick. 1998. "Emotion and communicative action: Habermas, linguistic philosophy and existentialism" pp. 16-38 in Emotions
in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues, edited by Gillian Bendelow and Simon J. Williams. London: Routledge
Gajda, Jan. 1982. “August 1980 As I Saw It”, in Sisyphus Sociological Studies, Volume 3: Crises and Conflicts, The Case of Poland
1980-1981, edited by Wladyslaw W. Adamski. Warsaw: PWN - Polish Scientific Publishers, 236-251
Gardiner, Michael. 1992. The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin & the Theory of Ideology. London: Routledge
Goodwyn, Lawrence. 1991. Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland. New York: Oxford University Press
Hall, Joan Kelly. 1995. “(Re)creating our Worlds with Words: A Sociohistorical Perspective of Face-to-Face Interaction.” Applied
Linguistics, 16.2. 206-232.
Kaszuba, Gerard. 1982 "My reminiscences of, and experiences from, the strike in the Ustka shipyard in August 1980," pp. 278-288 in
Sisyphus Sociological Studies, Volume 3: Crises and Conflicts, The Case of Poland 1980-1981, edited by Wladyslsaw W Adamski.
Warsaw: PWN - Polish Scientific Publishers
Kemp-Welch, A., ed. 1983. The Birth of Solidarity: The Gdansk Negotiations, 1980. London: Macmillan
Kuczma, Jozef. 1982. "August 1980 as I remember it" pp. 252-271 in Sisyphus Sociological Studies, Volume 3: Crises and Conflicts, The
Case of Poland 1980-1981, edited by Wladyslaw W. Adamski Warsaw: PWN - Polish Scientific Publishers
Laba, Roman. 1991. The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland's Working-Class Democratization. Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press
Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 1980, vol. 4, nos. 1-3
Mason, David. 1985. Public Opinion and Political Change in Poland, 1980-1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Nowak, Stefan. 1980. “Value systems of the Polish society,” Polish Sociological Bulletin, 50
--------. 1981. “Values and attitudes of the Polish people,” Scientific American, 245:1 July
Ost, David. 1990. Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: opposition and Reform in Poland Since 1968. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press
Pawelec, Wladyslaw. 1982. "Seventeen hot days," pp. 272-277 in Sisyphus Sociological Studies, Volume 3: Crises and Conflicts, The
Case of Poland 1980-1981, edited by Wladyslaw W. Adamski. Warsaw: PWN - Polish Scientific Publishers.
Persky, Stan. 1981. At the Lenin Shipyard: Poland and the Rise of the Solidarity Trade Union Vancouver: New Star
-------- and Henry Flam, eds. 1982. The Solidarity Sourcebook.Vancouver: New Star
Potel, Jean-Ives. 1982. The Summer Before the Frost. London: Pluto.
Reicher, Stephen. 1996a. "Collective psychology and the psychology of the self," The BPS Social Psychology Section Newsletter, 36: 315
--------. 1996b, "'The Crowd' century: Reconciling practical success with theoretical failure," British Journal of Social Psychology, 35:
535-553
Sarbin, Theodore R. 1986. "Emotion and act: roles and rhetoric." pp. 83-97 in The Social Construction of Emotions, edited by Rom Harré.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Shotter, John and Michael Billig. 1998. “A Bakhtinian psychology: from out of the heads of individuals and into the dialogues between
them.” pp. 13-29 in Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. No Last Word, edited by Michael Mayerfield Bell and Michael Gardiner.
London: Sage
13
Solidarity Strike Bulletins, August 1980, translated in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 1980, vol. 4, nos. 1-3.
Steinberg, Marc W. 1996. Toward a dialogic analysis of social movement culture: reframing frame analysis. Presented at Social Science
History Association meeting, New Orleans, LA, 11 October 1996.
Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart. 1998. "Embodiment and communication. Two frames for the analysis of ritual." Social
Anthropology, 6.2, 237-251.
Szylak, Jan. 1982. "My reminiscences of August 1980." pp. 289-309 in Sisyphus Sociological Studies, Volume 3: Crises and Conflicts,
The Case of Poland 1980-1981, edited by Wladyslaw W Adamski. Warsaw: PWN - Polish Scientific Publishers.
Tilly, Charles. 1994. “Social movements as historically specific clusters of political performances,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 38, 130
Vale, Michael, ed. 1981. Poland: The State of the Republic. London: Pluto.
Volosinov, V. N. 1976a. Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, translated by I. R. Titunik. New York: Academic Press
--------. 1976b. "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art (concerning sociological poetics)", appendix to Freudianism: A Marxist Critique,
translated by I. R. Titunik. New York: Academic Press.
--------. 1986. Marxism and the Theory of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
Vygotsky, Lev. 1986. Thought and Language, edited by Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford: Oxford University Press.
--------. 1979. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso.
14
Colin Barker